The surfaces of many objects used in everyday life tend to attract and harbor potentially harmful infectious organisms, such as microbes, pathogens, viruses, bacteria and the like. Particularly infected are objects that are passed from one person to another without the benefit of cleaning or sanitizing. Objects that are handled or breathed-on by different people, or come in contact with surfaces contaminated by other people or animals, can themselves become contaminated. If these objects then contact another person, they can transmit diseases. Even the hands and clothing of medical or healthcare personnel can serve to transmit diseases. This contamination problem is particularly acute with objects used continually by different people. If they are not sterilized between the different users of the objects they can serve as the vector to transmit the disease from one person to the next. Examples include TV remotes in hotel rooms and medical devices.
One method of reducing the impact of infectious organisms are exposure to germicidal ultraviolet bulbs. The bulbs are generally short wave low pressure mercury vapor tubes that produces ultraviolet wavelengths that are lethal to micro-organisms. Approximately 95% of the ultraviolet energy emitted by these bulbs is at and around the mercury resonance line of 254 nanometers. This wavelength is in the region of maximum germicidal effectiveness and is highly lethal to virus, bacteria and mold spores. It deactivates the DNA of bacteria, viruses and other pathogens and thus destroys their ability to multiply and cause disease. Specifically, UV-C light causes damage to the nucleic acid of microorganisms by making them form covalent bonds between certain adjacent bases in the DNA. The formation of such bonds prevents the DNA from being unzipped for replication, and the organism is unable to reproduce. In fact, when the organism tries to replicate, it dies. UVC radiation has extremely low penetrating ability and does not penetrate past the dead-cell layers of the skin. UV will cause eye irritations or burns after prolonged exposure.
Devices for sanitizing objects that might have harmful infectious organisms on their surfaces have been described, for example, U.S. Pat. Application 2005/0063922A1 to Wesley et al. The devices use sanitizing bulbs that emit sanitizing radiation and shine that radiation onto the surfaces of the object to be sanitized. The sanitizing radiation is a light-of-sight process in which the radiation impinges directly onto the surfaces which are in an unimpeded straight line from the source to the surface. As such, anything in the way of the direct line from the irradiation source to the surface, such as dirt particles and the like on the surface, will prevent those covered surface areas from being sanitized. This is a recognized problem with the devices currently available. One method to improve the problem, in one case, is by rotating the object to be sanitized so that more surface can be aligned in a line-of-line configuration with the radiation source as the device rotates. Another method to improve this problem is by providing mirrors and/or mirrored surfaces that reflect the sanitizing radiation at different angles to the surface areas to be sanitized. One drawback to mirrors is that the intensity of the sanitization radiation is reduced the further it has to travel, in inverse proportion to the distance, such that as the radiation gets reflected around the chamber the distance the radiation travels increases and the intensity of the radiation decreases. Thus any sanitization that depends on reflected sanitization radiation will require a longer radiation time to be effective as a sanitization device and/or process. Although the prior art addresses this problem, they are only a work-around from the cause of the problem. None of the solutions described in the prior art remove the radiation blocking material.